Connecting things. Our philosophy is that things can be connected to deliver best effect. From people to software, systems to services, creating connections increases value for all. We could quote you Reed's Law of Group Forming Networks but that would just be showing off and we would rather just show you the effects. When we talk about connecting, we mean the provision of an opportunity for a conversation to take place. That conversation could be between previously siloed systems, across organisational departments, or simply percolating thoughts and ideas throughout a team. Below are details of some of the open, agile techniques and technologies that we employ in our business to support these connections.

Our Approach:

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  Agile Development:  We create prototypes to illustrate the 'art-of-the-possible' and then work alongside customer teams to evolve towards a 'final' solution. Extensive use of version control, build automation, embedded documentation, and idea management systems allow for a flexible approach to systems solutions.
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  Virtual Teams:  We employ a virtual team approach that benefits all concerned. Our clients get the best people for the job based on skill set, location, and schedule; our team get to work on the projects that are most engaging for them, and we keep our overheads low so that we do not have to charge as much as others do.
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  Open Standards:  We are strong advocates of open standards, believing that they increase the compliance, the flexibility and the extensibility of the solutions we provide. We have a tendency to wrap proprietary formats into open standards to improve component reuse and information sharing.
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  Open Source:  We are also advocates of open source, one of our key tenets. As such, we deploy software solutions on proven, stable, and open servers and use open source software (where possible) to reduce overall costs and reliance on expensive proprietary software.

Key Technologies:

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  Languages: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Java, .NET, Python, Perl, and SQL amongst others.
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  Open Standards:
  • Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) GIS Standards
  • Data and Content Formatting (XML, JSON, xHTML, and CSS 2.0)
  • Web Services (SOAP and REST)
  • OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards
• Open Source:
  • Servers:
    • Apache HttpD Webserver
    • Apache Tomcat Application Container
    • GeoServer (Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS))
  • Software:
    • PostgreSQL Database Database with extensions for geospatial support
    • GeoTools geospatial toolkit
    • TileCache map caching services
    • OpenLayers web mapping libraries
    • Exteca language processing and knowledge management toolkit
    • ESPer complex event stream processing toolkit
    • MIT SIMILE semantic web client components
    • ExtJS AJAX toolkit for Web User Interfaces

Systems Components:

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  Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)
• Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0
• Social Networking Analysis
• Data Fusion
• Machine Learning
• Wireless Sensor Networks
• Data Mining
• Mesh Networking
• Network (Link/Coefficient) Analysis
• Spatio-Temporal Visualisation
• Geosocial Solutions
• Complex Event Processing

Partners:

We not enter into exclusive agreements with partners in order to ensure total independence when giving advice. However, if we deem it appropriate, we choose partners on a project basis to offer the very best solutions to your problem as we have no interest in reinventing the wheel. Some of the best-of-breed commercial offerings we have used come from:

• Oculus (Canada) - Data visualisation, geotemporal, and analytical software
• MetaCarta (USA) - Geospatial tagging and related services
• Cycorp (USA) - Common-sense knowledge bases